Old and New Masters eBook

We know little of his wanderings in the next five
years, nor do we know whether the greater part of
them was spent in crimes or in reputable idleness.
Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to Charles
of Orleans, but there are few facts for a biographer
to go upon during this period. Nothing with a
date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461, when
Thibault d’Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans, for some
cause or other, real or imaginary, had him cast into
a pit so deep that he “could not even see the
lightning of a thunderstorm,” and kept him there
for three months with “neither stool to sit
nor bed to lie on, and nothing to eat but bits of
bread flung down to him by his gaolers.”
Here, during his three months’ imprisonment
in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of
life which makes his Grand Testament a “De
Profundis” without parallel in scapegrace literature.
Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul
grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells
began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of
his earlier follies. He is henceforth the companion
of lost souls. He is the most melancholy of cynics
in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him
the vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has
all the hatreds of a man tortured and haunted and
old.

Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality.
His only complaint against the flesh is that it perishes
like the snows of last year. But to recognize
even this is to have begun to have a just view of life.
He knows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing
city. He becomes the servant of truth and beauty
as he writes the most revealing and tragic satires
on the population of the tavern in the world’s
literature. What more horrible portrait exists
in poetry than that of “la belle Heaulmiere”
grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned to
hideousness—­her once fair limbs become “speckled
like sausages”? “La Grosse Margot”
alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and
her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade
which links her name with Villon’s:—­

But there is more than the truth of ugliness in these
amazing ballads of which the Grand Testament
is full. Villon was by nature a worshipper of
beauty. The lament over the defeat of his dream
of fair lords and ladies by the reality of a withered
and dissatisfying world runs like a torment through
his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitable
passing of loveliness in lovelier verse than Villon
has done in the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis.
I have heard it maintained that Rossetti has translated
the radiant beauty of this ballade into his Ballad
of Dead Ladies. I cannot agree. Even his beautiful
translation of the refrain,

But where are the snows of
yesteryear,

seems to me to injure simplicity with an ornament,
and to turn natural into artificial music. Compare
the opening lines in the original and in the translation,
and you will see the difference between the sincere
expression of a vision and the beautiful writing of
an exercise. Here is Villon’s beginning:—­